The Fulton Report and the Battle over College Autonomy (1963–1976)

⚠️ This article belongs to the unofficial-history module (13. University Governance and Restructuring). It compiles historical events supported by multiple independent sources, with each claim sourced. Sensitive personal information involving individuals is handled by referring to them as "Mr. [Surname]"; founding scholars and deceased figures who already appear in publicly available historical records are named according to the sources. Incumbent leadership is referred to by title only.

On 24 December 1976, Hong Kong's Legislative Council passed the Chinese University of Hong Kong Bill on its third reading, transforming a university that had existed for only thirteen years from a federal structure into a unitary, centralised one. That same day, nine members of the Board of Governors of New Asia College tendered their collective resignation — the largest and most unequivocal protest of its kind in CUHK's history. Among the nine were two of the founding scholars who had laid the groundwork for New Asia: Ch'ien Mu (錢穆) and Tang Chun-i (唐君毅). The origins of this upheaval can be traced back three years earlier, to an internal reform group originally conceived as an act of "self-rescue".

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# 1. The Fulton Commission (1962–1963): A Blueprint for Federalism

According to a Wikipedia summary^※, in 1962 the Hong Kong Government appointed Sir John Fulton (Lord Fulton, formerly the founding Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sussex) to chair a commission tasked with studying the feasibility of merging three existing institutions — Chung Chi College, New Asia College, and United College — into a single university.

In 1963, the commission released the Fulton Report, which proposed integrating the three colleges under a federal constitution — retaining each college's own administrative, teaching, and cultural identity, with the central university acting as a coordinating layer rather than a replacement for the colleges' functions. The Hong Kong Government accepted the report's recommendations and that same year enacted the Chinese University of Hong Kong Ordinance. The University was formally established on 5 October 1963.

According to official historical records^※, CUHK's founding organisational philosophy was to preserve each of the three colleges' teaching, administrative, and cultural traditions, forming a university whole through a federal structure.

This framework carried enormous symbolic weight for the three colleges — especially for New Asia College. Founded in 1949 under the difficult post-war conditions of Hong Kong by scholars who had come south from mainland China — including Ch'ien Mu (錢穆), Tang Chun-i (唐君毅), and Zhang Peijie (張丕介) — New Asia saw its mission as continuing the Chinese humanistic tradition and nurturing students in a way that would "use humanistic education to remedy the excesses of modern materialism." When the three colleges agreed to merge into CUHK, New Asia's premise — understood by its founders — was that the Hong Kong Government had invited them to join under the banner of a "federal system," meaning each college would remain an independent educational entity, sharing only certain resources and the degree-awarding power at the university level. This understanding later became the moral foundation that New Asia's camp repeatedly invoked when protesting the restructuring in 1976.

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# 2. Operational Frictions and Pressure to Centralise (1963–1976)

After 1963, several tensions emerged in the actual operation of the federal framework:

• Each college retained its own curriculum committee, faculty hiring authority, and so on, making it difficult to standardise academic regulations;
• The central university level (the Vice-Chancellor's office) lacked the integrated power to allocate financial resources or enforce uniform degree-awarding standards;
• The Hong Kong Government's education authorities and the predecessor body of the UGC raised doubts about the long-term sustainability of the federal model;
• The colleges operating independently also meant overlap of resources — for instance, they could each offer similar courses and maintain separate administrative teams, making it hard to achieve economies of scale.

By the early 1970s, these accumulated frictions had reached a tipping point, prompting the University to pre-empt a government-led intervention by first attempting to resolve the crisis through "internal reform" on its own.

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# 3. The First Clash: Yu Ying-shih and the "Working Group on University Administrative Reform" (1974–1975)

# 3.1 Who Was to Lead the Reform

According to multiple secondary historical sources, in 1973 the historian Yu Ying-shih (餘英時) accepted an appointment as President of New Asia College (at the time the head of a college was called "President"; after 1976 the title was changed to "Head of College"). Around early 1974, the then Vice-Chancellor of CUHK, Li Choh-ming (李卓敏), invited Yu to chair an internal review body — the "Working Group on University Administrative Reform" — whose members included younger-generation scholars who would later leave their own marks on New Asia's history, such as Ambrose King (金耀基) and Chen Fangzheng (陳方正).

In a sense, the establishment of this working group represented a "pre-emptive" attempt by the University itself: rather than passively waiting for an external review steered by the Hong Kong Government, the University would first propose its own reform plan internally.

# 3.2 Over a Hundred Meetings, and No One Was Satisfied

According to a survey article by Zhou Yan on Yu Ying-shih and the CUHK restructuring controversy^※, between summer 1974 and May 1975 the working group held more than a hundred meetings, exhaustively debating how the university's administrative structure should be adjusted. Yet the final proposal failed to satisfy any of the parties:

• The Hong Kong Government considered the reform insufficiently robust;
• The senior figures on the New Asia side — especially Tang Chun-i (唐君毅) and the New Confucian scholar Mou Zongsan (牟宗三) — also rejected the direction of the reforms, believing they struck at the heart of college autonomy.

According to the same source, Tang Chun-i regarded Mr. Yu's plan as a concession harmful to the interests of his alma mater (New Asia) and, for a time, even encouraged students to criticise Yu by putting up dazibao (大字報; big-character posters). What was originally intended as an act of internal "self-rescue" thus first tore open a rift within New Asia itself.

# 3.3 The Fate of the Reform Working Group

The working group's report was eventually submitted to Vice-Chancellor Li Choh-ming and then forwarded to the Hong Kong Government, but the Government did not adopt the proposal. Instead, it started afresh — appointing a new commission headed by Fulton himself to produce its own recommendations, which were swiftly accepted and implemented. According to the same source, Mr. Yu Ying-shih was caught in the middle and pleased no one: the college's senior figures saw him as having "sold out his alma mater," while the Government did not adopt his plan. He subsequently "departed for the United States in disappointment."

This episode — often overlooked in standard narratives of CUHK's history — makes clear that the 1976 restructuring was not a plan imposed out of nowhere by the Hong Kong Government: the University had indeed tried to respond to the pressure to centralise on its own terms, but the initiative for reform ultimately fell to an external commission appointed by the Government.

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# 4. The Second Fulton Commission and the 1976 Restructuring

# 4.1 The Commission's Composition and Method

In 1975, the Chancellor of the University appointed an external commission headed once again by Sir John Fulton to re-examine the university's constitution — this was the second Fulton Commission in CUHK's history. Other members included I.C.M. Maxwell (Secretary), Sir Michael Herries, and the sociologist C.K. Yang (楊慶堃). The commission collected the views of various stakeholders through five days of recorded hearings.

The commission's report was submitted to the Legislative Council in June 1976, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong Bill 1976 was immediately introduced into the legislative process.

# 4.2 What the Amendment Changed: From Federal to Unitary

According to the historical archive of the CUHK Ordinance^※, Wikipedia^※, and multiple secondary sources, the core recommendation of the second Fulton Report was to transfer a large share of the colleges' powers upwards to the central university:

• Academic policy, finance, student registration, staff appointments, curriculum design, examinations, and degree conferral were all brought under the university's central administrative structure;
• Practical matters such as campus building maintenance were also made the university's unified responsibility;
• The colleges' functions were narrowed to "small group student-oriented teaching";
• The official rationale stressed "rationalisation" — the overlapping of resources caused by each college going its own way had to be resolved through a unified structure.

Mr. M.C. Morgan, then an Assistant Secretary for Social Services, defended the restructuring, stating that "a situation with each college developing into a little university of its own was not compatible with the sensible evolution of a modern major seat of higher learning" — a phrase that has since been frequently cited as a succinct expression of the Government's official logic for centralisation.

After the amendment, Fulton himself offered an interpretation of the colleges' new role, reportedly describing the college as "a natural home for student-oriented teaching, a community where senior and junior members pursue their academic interests together" — a remark that is often quoted to illustrate how the colleges' positioning was recalibrated under the new framework.

# 4.3 Legislative Timeline

• June 1976: The second Fulton Report was submitted to the Legislative Council.
• The Chinese University of Hong Kong Bill 1976 then entered the legislative process.
• 24 December 1976: The bill was passed on its third reading in a Legislative Council sitting.
• The restructuring took formal effect in December 1976, and from that point the University moved entirely from a federal to a unitary operating structure.

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# 5. New Asia College's Opposition: The Collective Resignation of Nine Board Members

# 5.1 The Board's Position

According to Wikipedia and related records^※ and the New Asia College Wikipedia entry^※, the Board of Governors of New Asia College unequivocally refused to accept the restructuring proposal, arguing that the amendment would destroy the college system and reduce the colleges to "empty shells."

Denny Huang (黃麟書), a member of the Chung Chi College Board of Trustees and a scholar, also publicly criticised the centralisation drive, remarking that college governing bodies would be downgraded from substantively participatory institutions to being "merely managers of an estate."

# 5.2 24 December 1976: Nine Resign

On the very day the bill passed its third reading, nine members of the New Asia College Board of Governors tendered their collective resignation in protest. According to the New Asia College Wikipedia entry^※ and a related survey article^※, the resigning members included:

• Tang Chun-i (唐君毅) — New Confucian scholar and one of the founders of New Asia;
• Ch'ien Mu (錢穆) — historian, the first President of New Asia College, and one of its founders;
• Li Zufa (李祖法)
• Shen Yizhen (沈亦珍)
• Wu Junsheng (吳俊升)
• Xu Jiliang (徐季良)
• Liu Handong (劉漢棟)
• Ren Guorong (任國榮)
• Guo Zhengda (郭正達)

The nine issued a joint statement declaring: 「聯合制終於被棄，改為單一集權制……同人等過去慘淡經營新亞書院以及參加創設與發展中文大學所抱之教育理想無法實現……是非功罪，並以訴諸香港之社會良知與將來之歷史評判。」 ("The federal system has finally been abandoned and replaced by a single, centralised system… The educational ideals that we held dear during our painstaking efforts to build New Asia College and to participate in the founding and development of The Chinese University of Hong Kong can no longer be realised… We leave the judgment of right and wrong, merit and guilt, to the social conscience of Hong Kong and to the verdict of future history.") (As cited from multiple secondary sources; the authoritative wording should be based on the original archival record.)

# 5.3 Tang Chun-i's Moral Indictment

According to the relevant survey article^※, Tang Chun-i subsequently wrote to the CUHK Student Press, stating that while the restructuring "has become a thing of the past, the question of its rightness and wrongness has not passed." He asserted that the Hong Kong Government had "first invited New Asia and Chung Chi to participate in the founding of The Chinese University of Hong Kong under the name of a federal system, and then, reneging on its word, finally transformed it into a de facto unified system," declaring this to be "a moral transgression" (犯了道德上的罪過).

This was the gravest charge in the New Asia camp's opposition — one that elevated the dispute from the technical plane of "which is more administratively efficient" to the moral plane of "did the Hong Kong Government break faith with the founding promises?"

According to multiple historical records, New Asia College's opposition was the most categorical among the three colleges. Its stance — a tenacious defence of the college spirit — was closely tied to its founding philosophy: New Asia was created by a group of scholars who had come south (exemplified by Ch'ien Mu), who attached enormous importance to the humanistic tradition of the college as a scholarly community and harboured a historical wariness of centralisation.

# 5.4 Contending Positions Juxtaposed

According to the University's official position, the 1976 amendment aimed to "strengthen the University's overall resource coordination and the consistency of academic standards," enabling the University to operate more efficiently. The remarks by the then Assistant Secretary for Social Services, Mr. M.C. Morgan, represented the Government's argument for the necessity of centralisation.

According to the New Asia opposition camp (represented by Tang Chun-i), the amendment effectively terminated the spirit of federalism and constituted a breach of the Government's founding promises. The colleges were demoted from autonomous institutions with substantive academic powers to functional units mainly responsible for residential life and general education, and the ideal of the scholarly community was diminished.

According to the camp that took over the leadership of New Asia after the restructuring (represented by Ambrose King), the key recommendations of the second Fulton Report substantially carried forward the direction of the internal reform working group chaired by Yu Ying-shih; since its implementation, The Chinese University of Hong Kong has achieved tremendous development over the following decades — a retrospective line of argument that looks back on the developmental outcomes to confer legitimacy on the restructuring.

To this day, assessments of the 1976 amendment remain divided — supporters see it as a necessary institutional integration, while critics see it as a major curtailment of the spirit of college autonomy, even as a betrayal by the Hong Kong Government of its founding commitments. The present archive merely records the claims of each side; it issues no verdict.

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# 6. New Asia After the Restructuring: Ambrose King Takes Over

According to the New Asia College Wikipedia entry^※, in the wake of the restructuring controversy a camp led by Ambrose King (金耀基) — composed mainly of scholars who had come to Hong Kong from Taiwan — took control of New Asia College. Ambrose King assumed office in March 1977 as the seventh Head of New Asia College (and the first to bear the title "Head of College" after the restructuring; previously the post had been styled "President"), serving until July 1985.

Ambrose King held a different assessment of the restructuring from that of Tang Chun-i — according to related sources, he believed that the important recommendations of the reform working group had later "been accepted by the second Fulton Report, and since their implementation The Chinese University of Hong Kong has achieved tremendous development over the last forty years." This assessment, and Tang Chun-i's indictment of "reneging on promises and committing a moral transgression," constitute two entirely different historical memories of the same restructuring within New Asia College itself.

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# 7. The Subsequent Evolution of the College System

After 1976, the college system did not disappear; it continued in an adjusted form:

• Colleges still retained responsibility for student accommodation, general education (college activities / courses), and student development;
• Between 2006 and 2012, the University added five new colleges (S.H. Ho, C.W. Chu, Wu Yee Sun, Lee Woo Sing, and Morningside), and when the four-year curriculum was restored in 2012, a "3+3+0" college general-education requirement was fully implemented;
• Today the college system is positioned as a core element of CUHK's "unique educational experience," rather than as the autonomous academic institutions of the early years.

It is worth noting that, while the 1976 restructuring stripped the colleges of their academic and administrative autonomy, it also indirectly paved the way for the later expansion of a "universal college system" (see the article on Residence, Hall Culture, and College Traditions for more detail). Once the colleges were no longer independent teaching corporations, adding new colleges no longer carried the institutional burden of "setting up a separate fiefdom," and the University was able to keep adding colleges at a relatively low political cost, extending the college system's coverage to an ever-larger student population.

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# 8. Recent Governance Issues (2020s)

According to a report in Hong Kong Free Press^※ (May 2026), the University has proposed new governance measures involving adjustments to the college leadership structure and the composition of alumni representative bodies — the details of ongoing matters are subject to the final official announcements; in accordance with this archive's rules, incumbent leadership is referred to by title only, without being named.

Viewing 1976 within the long arc of CUHK's institutional history, it was the first battle waged on the terrain of "the Ordinance." The subsequent debates — the dispute over medium of instruction and internationalisation (2004–2011) and the 2023 Council restructuring — all continue the same through-line: How the University should be governed, and by whom — at CUHK this has never been a neutral technical question.

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